By Annette Aucamp & Nancy Azzam

In 2003, the LAUSD Board of Education voted to allow our school to become an independent charter, making it the largest charter school in the United States with over 4,000 high school students. Twenty years later, Granada Hills Charter (GHC) is still at the forefront of education.
This transition from being part of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to an independent charter provided many more opportunities for the school to expand both in terms of student population and curriculum.

Once the school became a charter, there were immediate changes such as student lunch becoming ticketless through using student IDs, summer transition academy (STA) for incoming ninth grade and new students becoming a graduation requirement, smaller class sizes, more staff, the addition of more language, visual and performing arts, career tech (CTE), and other courses as well as curriculum expanded to become the GHC we know today.

“Different from district schools, here you saw programs expanding, existing programs offering more, new programs starting, or even both,” CEO and Superintendent Brian Bauer said. “At the high school, Global Business and Finance launched early in the charter as a direct result of going charter. We added IB a number of years later, as well as different CTE programs, and more visual and performing arts classes. These are programs that typically get cut that we were able to expand.”

In August of 2019, GHC expanded not only academically but also to include our TK-8 program, which is housed at the Devonshire campus. The flexibility and resources to buy a piece of property from Pinecrest Schools and open a TK-8 program stem from GHC’s status as an independent charter school. Students now have the opportunity to be part of GHC for the entirety of their education from Transitional kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Students can experience the same rigorous and meaningful curriculum for their whole stay at GHC, preparing them even better for college.

These benefits are not only seen by students but their parents as well.


“My kids get an extremely strong academic background that they wouldn’t get at any other school. They also get a nurturing environment and world-class education. They are taught to be well-rounded and care about the community as well as about equality and love for one another,” said Susan Montoya, parent to a junior and third grader at GHC.


GHC’s TK-8 campus has many similar programs to its high school campus. They have language classes that students can participate in during their elementary and middle school years, the choice to continue with their IB program when moving on to high school, and a variety of electives to consider.


This year’s sophomores are the first group to include students who culminated from the TK-8 campus, with this year’s freshman class containing the second wave of TK-8 graduates.


Because the TK-8 and high school campuses are all a part of one school, the TK-8 staff is able to communicate with the high school staff and make sure there is a seamless transition. The alignment that this provides between how the two schools support, function, and challenge students does make a difference in how students learn.


“We see that academically and behaviorally, the students from the TK-8 are better prepared for high school as a group,” Bauer said.


All of these changes made by the transition from district to charter have left Granada students with all of the tools and opportunities for success.